Corrections_Today_January_February_2023_Vol.85_No.1

NIJ Update

Much of the funded research focused on more of the day-to-day, work-related stress associated with corrections work. That type of stress can be as debilitating as exposure to trauma for police officers. 1 NIJ’s goal was to observe whether correctional officers had similar experiences with organizational stress. MRI imaging to gauge impact of stress on day-to-day activities A major step forward for the inclusion of biomarkers in NIJ wellness research came from the Oregon Health and Science Univer sity (OHSU). The study included a robust measure of the impact of stress on daily function with the use of brain scans with MRI imaging. It investigated long-term exposure to work-related stress among Oregon correctional officers in medium and high-security facilities. The research team administered surveys to correc tional officers from six correctional facilities and conducted MRI imag ining and collected biomarkers of stress hormones and cardio-metabol ic risk on a subsample of 60 officers. Survey results from 329 cor rectional officers showed that work overload and other organizational stressors (e.g., insufficient resources, lack of supervisor support) were sig nificant sources of perceived stress. The threat of COVID-19 exposure was also a major source of stress, but it did not contribute as much as the everyday, work-related stress. Ad ditionally, extra money earned from working long hours did not seem to adequately compensate for the added stress placed by the overtime. 2 The addition of the biological and neuro-imaging data enhanced

the policy and practice relevance of the project because it allowed the research team to observe the impact of heightened stress levels in an operational setting. Using a subset of high-stress and low-stress cor rectional officers identified from the surveys, OHSU researchers were Survey results from 329 correctional officers showed that work overload and other organizational stressors (e.g., insufficient resources, lack

activate more cognitive attention to the simple tasks in the lab. 3 In an op erational setting, that may mean that correctional officers under higher levels of chronic occupational stress may have more difficulty, or take more time, identifying relevant in formation in a confusing or evolving situation. The OHSU research team is conducting additional analyses to see if these findings hold. 4 If the additional analysis does confirm them, these findings have major operational relevance. The slightest difficulty in quickly sift ing through conflicting information would put correctional officers at a disadvantage in a critical incident in a jail or prison setting. As the OHSU team conducts additional analyses on the extent of that impact on cogni tive processing and function, further research is also needed to understand how these findings translate from a controlled lab setting to the officers’ response to an evolving and possibly chaotic operational incident. The impact of latent brain trauma on incarcerated individuals From 2018 to 2021, NIJ sought to generate rigorous program evalua tions of emerging reentry initiatives. The effort resulted in 16 separate evaluations, three of which examined individuals with latent brain trauma reentering the community from incarceration. 5 Prevalence and impact of traumatic brain injury There is growing recognition that many incarcerated individuals are dealing with the lingering effects of a past TBI. Though estimates vary widely, one half to two-thirds of

of supervisor support) were

significant sources of perceived stress.

able to see, through MRI imaging, that stress levels impacted mental processing during the performance of mundane tasks. Officers under higher perceived stress levels (when compared to low-stress officers) had to activate the parts of their brain that dealt with focusing on relevant information and discarding irrel evant or conflicting information. The researchers attributed the response to the high-stress group having to

Corrections Today January/February 2023 — 15